GHOST

Well, what a couple of exciting, stressful, fantastic days. In the true spirit of cruising our Saturday afternoon turned into a hellish Monday morning and back again, and back again in a matter of 24hours.

Right now I'm on the boat on my own as Kat is in the hospital (or Ospedale in Italian!) for a second night after a fairly nasty spell of Salmonella poisoning. So how did we get to this?

Our third day in Otranto started with a trip to the local market where we found some great fresh produce, salami, cheeses, anchovies in salt (last longer that way), sundried tomatoes, a hamburger and a chicken burger for that night's dinner plus Kat filled the planter box she brought in Turkey with basil, mint and rosemary hence we now have a little portable garden on board. Then we ventured inland to Lecce in a hire car. Lecce was an interesting town. To start off with we thought we'd made a mistake coming, but once we found and penetrated the centre of the old town it was actually really quite good. Some piazzas, churches and an old Roman amphitheatre - apparently fantastic baroque architecture! After some lunch in the local gardens/park we drove down to Gallipoli (the Italian one) which proved to be a great little find once we finally arrived, as we must have taken every back road and country lane to get there! Then back to Otranto for our regular drink on the town wall as the sun set, followed by our respective burgers for dinner.

Had a very early start the following morning, 530am to make the 100nm to Crotone. The day started with a shock as we had a near miss with a small fishing vessel that was lost in the rising sun. Luckily no damage and no harm just very shaken nerves, but a valuable lesson nonetheless (Monday morning number one). Made decent progress to Crotone but by lunch Kat was a little off colour which we thought was perhaps mild sun stoke. We arrived in Crotone 12 hours and 15 mins after leaving Otranto, not bad time, and very soon had some Kiwi neighbours. Before long we were chatting with Ross and Jo Blackman and their good mate Pippa Blake, discussing all things boat and fishing (Ross had just landed a decent sized tuna). Very quickly it was beers and dinner on their yacht Sojourn and back to a Saturday afternoon lifestyle...just what we needed!! Kat however was off colour and was shortly making a hasty retreat to the bathroom and then bed.

The next morning she was no better so a day of rest was in order, but the with hot flushes and then shivers she was suffering. Spent the morning doing several jobs, keeping quiet, chatting boat stuff with Ross and trying to keep Kat hydrated (hard work, the woman won't drink water!). Ross, Jo and Pippa left early afternoon and while we loosely planned to catch-up the night after, Kat was not improving and soon a temperature check showed she was overheating at 40.1 degrees (promptly back to a Monday morning scenario) so the local guy on the pontoon was consulted (not a word of English) on the location of a doctor. No messing around, he had an ambulance within 5 metres of the boat with in 10 mins! Yet more conversing in sign language and rubbish attempts at Italian, Spanish, French and anything else we thought we knew and before you knew it we were bundled in the back of the ambulance bound for the 'Ospedale'. Now if you thought Italian driving was crazy at the best of times...I've (I say I as poor Kat was on the stretcher with some ice packs and several cables attached) never seen a breed of drivers that don't alter their style for an emergency vehicle quite like these guys!

And so began a 4hour marathon of sign language, broken English, broken Italian words, sometimes French, sometimes Spanish (even though I thought it was Italian!!) to explain where we had been, and that we thought it was a function of the chicken she'd eaten the night before. Their first concern was that it was Swine Flu and hence most of the 'Ospedale' staff were wearing full on masks. Finally a detailed list of our movements since January in Oz to the present, scribbled on the back of a massive piece of paper towel, proved to be our Rosetta stone (used several times since) and promptly the masks came off (not swine flu!) and we had a chest x-ray (I say we but clearly it was just Kat!), a transfer to intensive care for a drip to be inserted and some antibiotics. Pretty funny, Italian intensive care is like nothing else. Mobile phones ringing everywhere, people talking loud and gesticulating even louder (felt like saying " you don't need the phone, no matter where they are I'm sure they can hear you!"), doctors arguing...or so it seems before they all laugh out loud and slap each other on the back in jest! Clearly the common theme here is loud, but what a fabulous bunch of people.

Later in the night I made friends with my man Giuseppe, the taxi driver who did 3 trips between the 'Ospedale' and the boat and waited each time while I got some PJs, toothbrush etc for Kat and returned to her before coming home to the boat, all for 25euro. Since then he, or his son, has been on call for half a dozen other trips. He even got his niece on the phone who offered her English for translation if needs be! All the while Ross, Jo and Pippa have only been an SMS away offering support, weather updates and potential assistance as at one point there was talk of sending Kat to another 'Ospedale' in Reggio Di Calabria, some 200kms away which meant I'd have to get the boat down there on my own.

What a brilliant display of how kind, generous and caring people can be.

So here we are a dodgy bit of chicken and 36 hours later. Ironically Ross and co, some 20miles further east, left their marina this morning in 5knots of wind which very quickly turned into 38knots! So they went back in!! We had planned, before Kat's visit to the "Ospedale", to leave at 6am to catch-up with them so had we it would have been the 2007 fastnet all over!! Albeit in clear blue skies and 33 degrees but still not fun. Apparently Sardinia got hammered today with 50knots!

Fingers crossed tomorrow morning will bring a continued strong improvement and we might be out of Crotone in a day or so.



PS è ci un medico nel porticciolo? = is there a doctor in the marina?